Saturday 14 June 2003 10.28 EDT
First published on Saturday 14 June 2003 10.28 EDT

Rose Macaulayby Sarah LeFanu388pp, Virago, £20

Does Rose Macaulay (1881-1958) deserve a biography? She is the kind of figure who is always popping up in other people's stories - as the encouraging patron of the young Elizabeth Bowen, or the friend of Victor Gollancz or Ivy Compton-Burnett. She knew everyone, and went to all the literary parties, and was a fixture on magazines such as Time & Tide and the Spectator.

She comes in at the edge of anecdotes about other writers, such as the ridiculous story, told by Quentin Bell, of Virginia Woolf sitting next to Macaulay's lover at a noisy dinner and having a long conversation with him in which he was talking about "the whole coast" and she thought he was saying "the Holy Ghost": "And I asking 'Where is the Holy Ghost?' got the reply 'Wherever the sea is'; am I mad, I thought, or is this wit?"

As a young woman novelist living near Grantchester, Macaulay got to know her father's pupil, Rupert Brooke. She published a novel in 1911 in which a tortured young man remembers a childhood sanctuary in the country as a place of bees and honey. "And will there be honey for tea?" he asks. A year later, Brooke wrote "The Sentimental Exile", his first version of "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester", with his most famous line: "And is there honey still for tea?" LeFanu suggests that Brooke stole this from Macaulay; if so, it would be typical of the way her writing, and her story, have been overshadowed by her more famous contemporaries.

Yet she was extremely well-known in her lifetime as a novelist (she wrote 23 novels, for a while bringing out one a year), a Walter de la Mare-ish poet, a journalist, a 17th-century historian (there was a chatty book on Milton), a travel writer, a supporter of the League of Nations, and the author of endless comic essays and light pieces. She was a vivid letter-writer, an intrepid traveller, a fast talker, and a person of independence and humour who clearly inspired affection and loyalty. Gollancz fondly remembered her addiction to parties, her laughter, her terrible driving, and her generosity: "If I asked her for five pounds in some good cause, as I often did, she would usually send fifty."

The best pieces of writing here are appreciations of her by other writers. Rosamond Lehmann described her as "forever in transit... energetically not eating, not drinking or sleeping, so it seemed; yet such was her transparency and charity of spirit that she seemed universally available to her friends". The historian Veronica Wedgwood remembered her in the London Library, using the unsafe ladders between the floors: "Perhaps the idea of risk appealed to that streak of romantic daring in Rose's nature, or perhaps she just wanted to get to the books by the quickest possible route... she was forever up and down those ladders like a chamois."

The sharpest description comes from VS Pritchett: "She was as lively as a needle. She remained the discreet, learned and intrepid spinster of irreverent eye and rapid, muttering wit... Activity was her principle, asking questions her ironical pleasure."

There are more critical accounts of her by Virginia Woolf, who gets a predictably bad press here for cattiness and jealousy. Certainly her rapid sketches aren't kind, but they vividly catch a character: "Too chattery chittery at first go off; lean as a rake, wispy; & frittered. Some flimsy smartness & taint of the flimsy glittery literary about her: but this was partly nerves, I think; & she felt us alien & observant doubtless." As well she might.

But the chittery, flimsy, frittered image Woolf was trying for was something Macaulay was conscious of too. She was sardonic herself about the "flimsy" world of popular fiction and journalism. Her edgy, comic novel Potterism, a big hit in 1920, attacked the sentimental rhetoric of mass journalism and romantic fiction. A later novel, Keeping Up Appearances, mocked the "degraded activities" of a money-spinning novelist. Sharp-eyed and unself-deceiving, Macaulay probably knew that most of what she wrote would be forgotten.

She is read now, if at all, for her haunting post-war novel, The World My Wilderness, for two excellent travel books, They Went to Portugal and Fabled Shore (on Spain), and her last novel, The Towers of Trebizond, partly set in Turkey, with a memorable priest, Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg, and a splendid and much-quoted first sentence: " 'Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass."

Sarah LeFanu does a doughty job of persuading us that this is a life story worth telling, insisting, a little solemnly, on Macaulay's work as "important and influential and interesting", on her having been "systematically marginalised", and on her being, above all, "complex" and "complicated". She gives a lively account of Rose's unusual childhood, one of six children of a bossy, under-educated mother and a scholarly, radical, Cambridge father, growing up - and running wild - in an enchanting small Italian town on the Ligurian coast, west of Genoa, with an abrupt and dismal transition in her teens to north Oxford, and later to a remote Welsh country house.

The difficult mother, the startling transition from seaside freedom to English conventions, and two tragic deaths in the family, partly account for Rose's early eccentricity and neuroses. In her student years she hardly ate, and had a breakdown just when she was due to take her degree. Severe periods of depression ensued, and the novels, even when light, are marked by violence, cruelty, and loss. There was a complicated attitude to religion, too. With a grandfather and an uncle in the church and her sister a deaconess, Macaulay veered in and out of the Anglican church, rather as she moved, politically, towards and away from pacifism.

The rapid transformation from depressed young woman to unstoppable novelist isn't quite explained, but LeFanu makes the point that this is a private, rather inscrutable character, especially after her long clandestine affair began in 1918 with Gerald O'Donovan, a lapsed Irish priest, himself a novelist, a married man who never left his wife and children but incorporated Rose into his family life. She led a double life for more than 20 years - when Gerald died in 1942, she even wrote an anonymous obituary. After her own death, when her confessional letters to an Anglican priest were published, her friends were astonished to find she had kept this secret from them. They had her pigeonholed as a "spinster" or a "Eunuch" (Woolf).

One of the secrets that LeFanu investigates, but doesn't solve, is whether the secret affair, with no hope of children, was particularly suited to a woman whose sexuality was "ambivalent". As a child, she wanted to be a naval captain; many of her heroines are boyish or androgynous; she shared a house for a time with the literary editor Naomi Royde-Smith, de la Mare's lover. LeFanu deals with her subject's sexuality rather tentatively; she doesn't say whether she thinks Macaulay was bisexual or not. (I would have liked to know more, for instance, about her attitude to Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, which she was prepared to defend.)

This biography seems more at ease with the contradictions between an unsocialised, self-protective, independent self, and the highly gregarious metropolitan journalist and partygoer. LeFanu quotes one of Macaulay's better poems, on the clash between a desire to run amok and run free, and the middle-aged, responsible performance that we all grow into: "I might forget the world's a place / Where I must run a strenuous race, / And make my mark, and use my wit, / And earn my bread and do my bit. / I might forget that I am human, / An earnest, grown-up, working woman..."

That opposition between secret anarchy and public responsibility is an underlying theme of Macaulay's novel The World My Wilderness, which had a powerful effect on me as a young reader, growing up in postwar London. Its landscape of bombed churches and derelict streets powerfully expresses Macaulay's sense of desolation during and after the war, for herself (her own home was bombed and she lost all her books) and for Europe.

Macaulay's memory of her free childhood in Italy is reflected in the half-wild character of the young girl, Barbary, who - sent to England to be "civilised", for complicated family reasons - finds her true home among the ruins. Romantic and didactic though this novel is, it has a strong atmosphere (it would make a good film), comparable to - and surely influenced by - Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart.

Unfortunately, LeFanu's critical language is unexciting ("Her fictional output was considerable", "She pushes at the meanings of articulations of beliefs") and it doesn't catch fire when she comes to this book. She doesn't like the novel very much, which seems perverse for Macaulay's biographer. Still, I was glad to know that the vaguely romantic-sounding epigram that haunted me in my childhood ("The world my wilderness, its caves my home, / Its weedy wastes the garden where I roam, / Its chasm'd cliffs my castle and my tomb"), attributed to "Anon", was written by Macaulay herself: another example of this crafty, versatile writer's talent for self-effacement.